Local Business Urgent Change

Here is the translation of the provided text into English: In the just concluded August, Shanghai's food delivery man, Li Xuyang, experienced an unprecedented level of busyness.

Previously averaging 30 orders per day per month, his daily order volume suddenly increased to 50 orders in this month.

This is not only due to seasonal factors but also a direct reflection of the increasingly popular instant retail.

Recently, the field of instant retail has become a hot spot that major e-commerce platforms are vying to chase.

Taobao, JD.com, and TikTok have all set up eye-catching entrances for instant retail business on the homepage of their apps to attract users.

These giants have launched a comprehensive competition around the market share of instant retail, from improving the consumer experience, enriching the consumption scenario to shortening the delivery time, all can see their efforts to compete for the market.

Faced with JD.com, Taobao, and TikTok's active layout in the field of instant retail, Meituan, as a pioneer in this field, undoubtedly faces more attention and greater competition.

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In the second quarter of this year, Meituan's annual active user and merchant numbers both achieved new breakthroughs, with instant delivery orders reaching 6.2 billion orders, and quarterly revenue reaching 82.3 billion yuan.

In August this year, Meituan's instant delivery single-day peak order volume broke through 98 million orders, setting a new historical record.

Focusing on users as the anchor, focusing on the quality-price ratio, the cornerstone of commercial prosperity lies in accurately capturing and meeting the diverse needs of customers, thereby driving a virtuous cycle of the commercial ecosystem.

Instant retail, on the other hand, focuses on meeting users' "eating, drinking, playing, and having fun," covering a diversified scenario of local life services such as catering, accommodation, and entertainment.

Looking back, about 20 years ago, the emergence of Dianping marked the beginning of the digital exploration of local life services.

At that time, the "group buying" trend swept through, and with the rapid leap in Internet technology, traditional offline consumption activities accelerated the integration with online, triggering a "thousand group battle," with about 5,000 companies competing.

In this competition, a few companies such as Meituan and Alibaba broke through the encirclement.

To this day, the competitive situation in the local life service market has once again been upgraded, and the participants have changed to Internet giants such as Xiaohongshu, TikTok, and Pinduoduo.

The big factories entered with wind and rain, and the competition faced by Meituan has become more intense.

However, no matter how the competition changes, its core still focuses on how to efficiently match local supply and user demand, especially the rapid response in time sensitivity.

With the evolution of consumption concepts, consumers have put forward higher requirements for the diversification, convenience, quality, and cost-effectiveness of services.

In this new competition, Meituan has continued to deepen its advantages in the field of instant retail and responded to market changes with more flexible and changeable strategies.

In this quarter, Meituan has taken an important step in deepening user experience, launching the "Shen Member" service that connects the entire chain of eating, drinking, playing, and having fun, and successfully achieved full coverage of various consumption scenarios in July.

This innovative measure not only enhances user brand loyalty but also greatly expands the scope of cooperation with merchants.

As of July, the number of merchants participating in the "Shen Member" has exceeded 5 million.

At the same time, Meituan's group buying business continues to expand its boundaries, introducing more high-quality and low-priced products and service categories, further enriching consumer choices.

Driven by holidays and marketing activities in the second quarter, the brand image of "Meituan Group Buying, many stores, save a lot" has become deeply rooted in consumers' hearts, becoming the preferred platform in consumers' hearts.

Especially for leisure and entertainment products, both GTV and order volume have achieved a year-on-year growth of more than 60%.

Meituan's flash purchase, as an important part of instant retail, has also performed well.

In this quarter, Meituan's flash purchase continued to expand the range of high-quality supply and established in-depth cooperation with more retail entities such as fast-moving consumer goods, clothing, wine, and beverages, providing consumers with instant and convenient shopping experiences in various scenarios such as festivals, travel, and camping.

It is worth mentioning that the innovative model of wine retail "Wai Ma Send Wine" achieved strong GTV growth in this quarter, becoming a highlight of Meituan's flash purchase business.

The continuous optimization of the platform's supply, the dual drive of online shelf model and innovative products, Meituan caters to the needs of users of different price bands for quality-price ratio.

A series of measures have also shown positive effects.

Since the middle of 2020, Meituan's annual transaction frequency of annual transaction users has achieved a steady growth for 15 consecutive quarters, and this continuous growth trend fully proves the high recognition and satisfaction of users for Meituan's services.

Deep into the supply side, all-round assistance to local entities.

The "2023 China E-commerce Market Data Report" shows that the scale of China's e-commerce market in 2023 reached 50.57 trillion yuan, a growth of 6.31% compared to 2022.

The "Instant Retail Industry Development Report (2023)" predicts a rapid growth prospect, predicting that the instant retail market will usher in explosive growth in the next few years, and it is expected that by 2025, its market scale will surge to three times that of 2022, with an average annual growth rate of over 50%.

Instant retail has become a strategic highland that many companies must pay attention to.

In the trillion-level blue ocean of instant retail, the key to success is to take two approaches at the same time: to be keenly aware of and accurately meet the increasingly diversified needs of consumers, and to create real value for merchants, building a win-win cooperative ecosystem.

In the second quarter, Meituan continued to optimize the service ecosystem for merchants, and through a series of innovative measures, effectively promoted the dual leap in merchants' operational efficiency and business scale.

Among them, Meituan's "brand satellite store" project attracted the participation of well-known brands such as Laoxiangji and Haidilao.

Through commission discounts, traffic tilt, and professional operational support, it helped merchants quickly expand the online market.

As of the end of June, the project has covered the whole country, helping more than 120 brands to open more than 800 satellite stores.

In addition, Meituan's lightning warehouse, with its full-link empowerment strategy, provides merchants with one-stop services from online operations, pricing strategies, traffic introduction, and efficient fulfillment, helping merchants to comprehensively improve the quality of operations, and successfully expanded to more regions in this quarter.

At the same time, Meituan's "HEALTH" business growth model launched in the field of medicine, and the popularization of online medical insurance drug purchase services, further highlight Meituan's deep cultivation in the field of digitalization of pharmaceutical retail.

With the help of the traditional consumption peak season, Meituan's to-store wine and travel business also achieved a strong recovery, with both order volume and transaction user numbers achieving significant growth, and the activity of merchants reaching a new high.

In the second quarter, the "Must Eat List" released by Dianping in 2024 focused on urban characteristics and local catering culture, providing a broad stage for many small merchants to showcase themselves and achieve growth.

There is no end to the beginning.

In this rapidly changing business era, consumers and merchants have chosen Meituan, and Meituan has also responded to this trust with practical actions.

Meituan CFO Chen Shaohui said: "In the first half of this year, the local business field represented by 'eating, living, traveling, shopping, and entertainment' benefited from the traditional consumption peak season.

Meituan fully exerted its overall advantages in both supply and demand, and met more new demands with more diverse supplies.

In the future, Meituan will continue to focus on the 'retail + technology' strategy, promote the digital upgrade of the retail industry, and create value for the industry chain."